Why rent goes up: the political economy of UK housing
Rent isn't a force of nature. It's a policy outcome — and a different policy can change it. A clear-eyed look at how UK housing got this expensive, and what we can do about it.
There is a story that gets told about housing in the UK: that rent is high because demand is high, because supply is low, because builders won't build, because planning is too restrictive. Most of that story is wrong, or at least incomplete. This is a short essay about what is actually going on.
The supply story doesn't add up
There are roughly 670,000 dwellings sitting empty in England alone — more than a year's housing-completion target. Meanwhile, since the 1980s, we have lost more than 2.4 million council homes through the Right to Buy. The supply is there. What is missing is the right kind of supply at the right cost.
Rent extraction, not housing provision
The dominant mode of "housing provision" in the UK is no longer building new homes for people to live in. It is the extraction of rent from a fixed asset class, financialised through mortgage lending and buy-to-let. When you buy a house in 2026, on average you spend more than half the price on land — not bricks. That land does no work. It collects rent.
What it would take to change
Restoring proper council-house building, funded by central grant, with rents linked to local incomes rather than market rates.
Ending the privileged tax treatment of buy-to-let portfolios.
Rent regulation in markets where the rental sector is structurally non-competitive (most cities).
A serious land-value tax to recover the publicly-created value that currently flows to private landowners.
None of these are radical proposals by international standards. Most of our European neighbours do one or more of them already. The only thing radical is the suggestion that we, here, could do them too.
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Why rent goes up: the political economy of UK housing
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